Mr. William J. Adams

Bill Adams ('64) started working on the Daily Cal's business staff "as a flunky" in the late fall of 1959 and worked his way to business manager for the spring semester of 1962.

"One of our big projects that semester was the 40-page issue for John Kennedy's Charter Day visit," he says."Since the presses could handle no more than 16 pages, we needed two rounds of stuffing to put it all together."

Among the perks he remembers was the all-floor alarm system "that warned when the campus police were coming to ticket our (illegally) parked cars in the lot next to old Eshleman Hall."

After his stint as business manager, he says, "I thought the only reasonable thing to do next was to drop out of school.So I did.Nine months of working at Hewlett Packard, before they became a computer company, convinced me that going to school was more fun than working, so I returned and finished up my B.S. in electrical engineering in 1964.No one seemed interested in offering me a job, so I decided to continue going to school."

Bill moved to Syracuse, changed fields to an interdisciplinary program called sensory communication, with specialties in sensory physiology and electrophysiology, and received his Ph.D. in 1970.He then moved to Purdue University in electrical engineering and neurobiology.

"Except for the fact that Purdue is in Indiana, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he says."I had some fun working with the staff of the Purdue Exponent after the University Senate appointed me as a faculty representative to the advisory board, over the objections of my department chairman.

"In three years, the Exponent moved from a student activity to a fully-salaried professional student newspaper," he says.

Bill later received a big research grant and a teaching award "just as I was about to be considered for promotion to tenure.Fortunately, in hindsight, the promotion never came."

He moved to the Friedrich Miescher-Institut in Basel, Switzerland in January 1977, supposedly for a three-year appointment with no possibility of renewal.But he stayed there for seven years and then moved across town to the pharmacology department in the Biozentrum of the University of Basel as a staff scientist.

William J. Adams

Mr. Adams is a graduate student studying biomedical engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He has achieved a Masters Degree from Harvard SEAS as well as a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University. Mr. Adams enjoys working out in which he focuses on running, swimming, and cycling. He recently ran a half marathon and participated in a triathlon. In his spare time, he can be found in a bookstore or reading a good book.

The first minister of this congregation, William Adams, worked in India with Roy translating the New Testament into Bengali.In the process both were converted.Roy founded the Bramo Samaj, his reformed version of monotheistic Hinduism.Adams was converted from Baptist to Unitarian.He established a Unitarian mission in Calcutta, before serving as Professor of Oriental Literature at Harvard and then coming to us.They didn't like Adams at King's College, but I'm told he attracted quite a crowd here on Sunday mornings where his sermon focused on practical matters.And his midweek lecture evenings where he talked about theology were even more popular.

What are some of Hinduism's correctives to our own faith?

First, Hinduism's five-thousand-year history challenges us to take the long view.Ten or twenty years, one or two generations: these are nothing.Our daily struggles and our petty differences are not the centre of the universe.Hinduism puts the minutia of our tiny lives into a broader perspective.

William J. Adams, Professor of Economics, jimadams@umich.edu, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and joined the faculty at Michigan in 1973.Professor Adams divides his attention between industrial organization and the European economy.His papers have appeared in such journals as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Economic Journal.He is the co-editor of French Industrial Policy (1986), the author of Restructuring the French Economy: Government and the Rise of Market Competition since World War II (1989), and the editor of Singular Europe: Economy and Polity of the European Community after 1992 (1992).In recognition of his performance as a teacher, he has received the Amoco Award for Outstanding Teaching and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship.

Outside the University of Michigan, Professor Adams has taught at Harvard, the University of Paris I, the University of Aix-Marseille II, the European University Institute (Florence), and the University of Basel.He has undertaken projects for the Brookings Institution and for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.He has also served as an adviser to the United States Ambassador to France and to the Federal Trade Commission.

view: '98 Adams golden apple video (coming soon)